Carl Strathearn
carl strathearn

Dr Carl Strathearn

Lecturer

  C.Strathearn@napier.ac.uk

   

Biography

Carl Strathearn is a lecturer in computer science and researcher in AI and humanoid robots. He is interested in building bespoke humanoid robots, programming them and testing them in different situations and environments. His work in developing a ML algorithm for robotic lip sync was named in BBC Science's top 13 scientific moments of 2021. His Multimodal Turing Test was adopted by top robotics labs in Japan and published in the Guardian, and his dilating robotic eyes received numerous international awards for innovation. He was a regular commentator on BBC radio and has podcasts episodes on the UKRI Robot Talk and BBC Science - Instant Genius podcast. In 2025, he will be speaking at the United Nations, Global AI Summit, performing at the Fringe with his robot 'Euclid' and working with local charities to make robotics and AI more accessible to underprivileged communities. He also consults with businesses internationally and the UK Government Office for Science (GOScience) towards an RTA report on humanoid robots.

I am interested in research in the following areas:

Humanoid Control Systems
Artificial Muscles
Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning and Deep Learning (C++, C#, Python and Java)
CAD and system architectures
3D Printing and materials science
Facial Expression Analysis and User Detection
Virtual prototyping and mechanics (Mujoco and ROS2)

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15 results

From documents to dialogue: Context matters in common sense-enhanced task-based dialogue grounded in documents

Journal Article
Strathearn, C., Gkatzia, D., & Yu, Y. (2025)
From documents to dialogue: Context matters in common sense-enhanced task-based dialogue grounded in documents. Expert Systems with Applications, 279, Article 127304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.127304
Humans can engage in a conversation to collaborate on multi-step tasks and divert briefly to complete essential sub-tasks, such as asking for confirmation or clarification, be...

A Commonsense-enhanced Document-Grounded Conversational Agent: A Case Study on Task-based Dialogue

Conference Proceeding
Strathearn, C., & Gkatzia, D. (in press)
A Commonsense-enhanced Document-Grounded Conversational Agent: A Case Study on Task-based Dialogue. In ICNLSP Conference
This paper argues that future dialogue systems must be able to retrieve relevant information from multiple structured and unstructured data sources in order to generate natura...

The Task2Dial Dataset: A Novel Dataset for Commonsense-enhanced Task-based Dialogue Grounded in Documents

Conference Proceeding
Strathearn, C., & Gkatzia, D. (2021)
The Task2Dial Dataset: A Novel Dataset for Commonsense-enhanced Task-based Dialogue Grounded in Documents. In Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Natural Language and Speech Processing (ICNLSP 2021) (242-251
This paper describes the Task2Dial dataset, a novel dataset of document-grounded task-based dialogues in the food preparation domain , where an Information Giver (IG) provides...

The Multimodal Turing Test for Realistic Humanoid Robots with Embodied Artificial Intelligence

Conference Proceeding
Strathearn, C., & Ma, M. (2021)
The Multimodal Turing Test for Realistic Humanoid Robots with Embodied Artificial Intelligence. In Joint Proceedings of the LIFELIKE 2020 - 8th Edition in the Evolution of the Workshop Series of Autonomously Learning and Optimizing Systems (SAOS) co-located with 2020 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2020)
Alan Turing developed the Turing Test as a method to determine whether artificial intelligence (AI) can deceive human interrogators into believing it is sentient by competentl...

Chefbot: A Novel Framework for the Generation of Commonsense-enhanced Responses for Task-based Dialogue Systems

Conference Proceeding
Strathearn, C., & Gkatzia, D. (2021)
Chefbot: A Novel Framework for the Generation of Commonsense-enhanced Responses for Task-based Dialogue Systems. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation (46-47
Conversational systems aim to generate responses that are accurate, relevant and engaging, either through utilising neural end-to-end models or through slot filling. Human-to-...

The Task2Dial Dataset

Dataset
Gkatzia, D., & Strathearn, C. (2021)
The Task2Dial Dataset. [Dataset]
URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/cstrathe435/Task2Dial

Artificial Eyes with Emotion and Light Responsive Pupils for Realistic Humanoid Robots

Journal Article
Strathearn, C. (2021)
Artificial Eyes with Emotion and Light Responsive Pupils for Realistic Humanoid Robots. Informatics, 8(4), Article 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics8040064
This study employs a novel 3D engineered robotic eye system with dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) pupils and a 3D sculpted and colourised gelatin iris membrane to replicate...

A Novel Speech to Mouth Articulation System for Realistic Humanoid Robots

Journal Article
Strathearn, C., & Minhua, M. (2021)
A Novel Speech to Mouth Articulation System for Realistic Humanoid Robots. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 101(3), Article 54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01332-2
A significant ongoing issue in realistic humanoid robotics (RHRs) is inaccurate speech to mouth synchronisation. Even the most advanced robotic systems cannot authentically em...

A Framework for Constructing and Evaluating the Role of MR as a Holographic Virtual Guide in Museums

Journal Article
Hammady, R., Ma, M., Al-Kahla, Z., & Strathearn, C. (2021)
A Framework for Constructing and Evaluating the Role of MR as a Holographic Virtual Guide in Museums. Virtual Reality, 25, 895-918. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-020-00497-9
Mixed reality (MR) is a cutting-edge technology at the forefront of many new applications in the tourism and cultural heritage sector. This study aims to reshape the museum ex...

Modelling User Preference for Embodied Artificial Intelligence and Appearance in Realistic Humanoid Robots

Journal Article
Strathearn, C., & Ma, M. (2020)
Modelling User Preference for Embodied Artificial Intelligence and Appearance in Realistic Humanoid Robots. Informatics, 7(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics7030028
Realistic humanoid robots (RHRs) with embodied artificial intelligence (EAI) have numerous applications in society as the human face is the most natural interface for communic...

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